A Relevent BENEVOLENT Off-Broadway — Review

After impressing with the surrealist cunicularii in 2024 and the tragi-comic Road Kills last year, Good Apples Collective have delivered another winner with benevolent, a moving and carefully wrought new work making its world premiere at IATI Theater through September 5. 

Set in a New York reformatory home in 1917, benevolent marks the latest collaboration between playwright Sophie McIntosh and director Nina Goodheart, who co-founded Good Apples. The play is more starkly naturalistic than McIntosh’s previous works, and does feel constrained at times by the solemnity of its period setting. But Goodheart’s sensitive production confirms this company’s precision in bringing tonally tricky, women-led stories to the stage. 

Set in a dismal basement laundry, benevolent follows four “fallen” young women forced to live and work in the oppressive Inwood Benevolent Home. Three longtime residents, Sarah (Rachel Ravel), Margaret (Chani Reese) and Emma (Mia Fowler), are joined by newcomer Abby (Livvy Marcus), a privileged girl sent temporarily to the home as punishment—and also, she cheerfully announces, to see “how the other half lives.”

The play’s drab set makes for a worrying first impression, suggesting we might be in for a chore-like history lesson. (Designer Junran “Charlotte” Shi does what she can with this black box space, drawing our focus to the ever-growing mound of laundry at its center.) But despite its setting, benevolent actually proves a warm and humorous work. The four women bicker and tease enjoyably as they scrub away at their washboards, each of them gradually dropping their guard and revealing subtly textured backstories. 

McIntosh lets the cruel indignities of a misogynistic society, along with the routine abuse in the benevolent home itself, live naturally in each woman’s lived experience. References to parental abandonment and assaults by male staff are almost tossed off, with a sigh and a forced smile. This is a relevant play, but never a didactic one. 

Two extended moments of surprising intimacy—a pair of scenes that elegantly mirror one another—elevate benevolent beyond the familiar beats of its narrative. In the first, the camaraderie of Margaret and Sarah, the two troublemakers of the group, develops touchingly (no pun intended) into a more intimate bond. The scene is beautifully played by performers Ravel and Reese, most especially in the genuine delight that both women take in this shared moment of discovery. 

In the second scene, the comparatively discreet Emma reveals her own closely-guarded history to the open-hearted Abby. Both moments see these wary personalities opening themselves up; in both, there is a physical closeness unique to the bond of womanhood. Goodheart guides these parallel moments expertly—the performances are wrenching, and always truthful. 

The plot developments in benevolent are heavily telegraphed, and mostly unsurprising. The physical production is also disappointing in some respects, though it scarcely matters with performances of this caliber. Goodheart does get a huge assist from sound designer Max Van, who lays in distant screams and disturbing soundscapes (playing over scene transitions) that tell us everything we need to know about life on the floors above. For all its dreariness, this laundry is actually an escape—a refuge, of a kind. And when it is ultimately lost, we share in these women’s pain at the unique cruelty of the injustice.

For tickets and more information, visit here.